Standing Stones

Piedras de reposo

everything I want to tell you son Is that you should go through suffering If you come to its shore if its shore comes to you Enter its night and let yourself sink its gulp may drink you down its foam overwhelm you Let go let yourself go Everything I want to tell you son On the other side of suffering Another shore lies there you will find great stone slabs One of these bears your carved form etched with your ancient mark Where you in your fullness will
fit exactly these are not tombs son They are standing stones with their small engraved suns and their crevices and cracks

María Auxiliadora Álvarez (Caracas, 1956) is a poet and scholar. Her poems are born in that tenuous frontier between body and experience, memory and desire, violence and humility. She is widely read in poetic circles in Latin America, especially but not only by women poets. Her fifteen books of poems, some of them previously unpublished, have been collected and published in Spain (Las nadas y las noches, Candaya, 2009). Álvarez is also a distinguished scholar, and has lectured and taught at Miami University (Ohio), University of Illinois, and UNAM (Mexico). She currently lives in Oxford, Ohio.

Catherine Hammond has a BA in Spanish from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and an MFA from Arizona State University in creative writing. Poems translated from Olvido García Valdés’ collection And We Were All Alive / Y todos estábamos vivos appear as a chapbook, House Surrounded by Scaffold, from Mid-American Review. She also has translations in American Poetry Review, Field, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Drunken Boat, and many other national magazines. Hammond’s own poetry has been anthologized in Fever Dreams: Contemporary Arizona Poetry from University of Arizona Press, in MARGIN: Exploring Modern Magical Realism, and in Yellow Silk from Warner Books. She has three Pushcart nominations.

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Words without Borders opens doors to international exchange through translation, publication, and promotion of the best international literature. Every month we publish select prose and poetry on our site. In addition we develop print anthologies, work with educators to bring literature in translation into classrooms, host events with foreign authors, and maintain an extensive archive of global writing.